Recognise Mt Zion Aussie Indigenous Church Belmont 11/4/15
Introduction
I had an aboriginal friend in primary school, and we were the legal guardians of a niece who lived with us and whose dad was an Indigenous elder; but my serious spiritual interest in the role of the first peoples of Australia began in a prayer meeting in the 1990’s. It was at the time when there was a lot of debate about whether we should become a republic; when I heard one of my friends praying that the first president of Australia be an Indigenous person I sensed in my spirit that the Lord was saying something very important. (Since then I have prayed for the blessing of the native peoples of the land every day.) Knowing Margaret Jacobs well I soon headed off to talk to her husband Cedric who spoke passionately of the aboriginal people as the guardians of the soul of the country. Through other connections we travelled several times to Alice Springs, including journeying through the Goldfields with some Wongais, to the Central Australian Aboriginal Conference where I came to know Ronnie Williams. Ronnie struck me as a true spiritual father of Christians of whatever race. Other things happened over the years, Ruben Mills who used to be a member of this church was a student of mine at Tabor College, he still calls me from the Pilbara from time to time to ask for counsel and prayer.
More recently I have become connected with a Christian venture called The National Act of Recognition which has been going since 1997. Its facilitator Lindsay McDowell had a vision of tall ships sailing into Botany Bay and a peaceful meeting between the British and the local people. He sensed that Australia needed a re-enactment of the landing of 1770 and this time we needed to do it in an honouring way. This project is still gaining momentum across the country with lots of support from Indigenous people; here in WA Rodney Rivers is the main person involved. It was in an Act of Recognition meeting that I sensed the Holy Spirit begin to speak with me about some of the root problems holding back spiritual healing in our land.
The Beginning
When the apostle Paul preached to the Gentiles he explained how God sovereignly arranged where the tribes would live across the world; “From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. 27 “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. 28 For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” (Acts 17:26-28). This passage teaches us that the Indigenous people were originally placed here by God, and in their language, culture and use of the land unique features of the image of God could be spiritually recognised. The great tragedy is that at the foundation of Australia as a modern nation the English colonisers failed to recognise the image of God in the native peoples; this was a failure to recognise white and black alike had the same Creator-Father (Luke 3:38; Acts 17:28). This failure to recognise aboriginal people as God’s children was very predictable. The word “Father” may have been on the lips of the convicts and soldiers moved out of their own homeland against their will, but it was rarely in their hearts (cf. Matt 15:8-9). The first Europeans were simply too spiritually confused to be able to recognise the likeness of God in the Indigenous peoples they met. Let me try and explain what I mean with an illustration.
Some years ago we visited one of our daughters living in London and she took us to St Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday. The service was OK, but what I saw in the church shocked me. All around the walls were memorials to heroes of the British Empire, mostly dead soldiers. This was nothing less than idolatry, a sign of a period of history when the king of England was confused with the King of heaven and the Lordship of Christ was confused with the expansion of the Empire (Dan 4:37). This is the sort of broken spirituality that came to Australia with the First Fleet. Things were bad in those times.
The writer to the Hebrews tells us that we recognise God’s love as a Father through his gracious discipline. This is what the old King James Version says, “if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.” or in modern English, “If you are left without discipline, in which all have shared, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.” (12:8). The cruel way (floggings) in which the colonising powers abused rather than disciplined first their own people then the Indigenous natives made them feel unrecognised, illegitimate and like bastards! Ours is a nation where God the Father, who has always lovingly recognised his image in all his children, whatever their colour or culture, has long been dishonoured. In the Old Testament the Lord said, “I will honour those who honour me, and I will despise those who think lightly of me.” (1 Sam 2:30). A nation which has lost touch with the honour and glory of God as Father is a nation where, as the prophet Malachi put it, the hearts of fathers and children have turned away from each other and the land has come under a curse (4:6). The only answer to this dreadful state of affairs is Jesus!
Flesh and Blood
Let me bring this down to earth a little. I live in the city of Belmont. Some years ago I was at a meeting when one of the members of your church said to me, “You see all these young guys wandering around the streets of Belmont with nothing to do; none of them has a father at home.” Last Tuesday afternoon as I was going on a prayer walk by the Tonkin Highway I noticed up in front of me four young aboriginal lads; they all were picking up stones and throwing them at the cars speeding along the road. This is very dangerous. A few minutes after I arrived home I came out the front door and there were those 4 youths next to my house being questioned by a policeman over this offence. This was no “coincidence”, the Lord is trying to tell us something very important. Our only hope for transformation is for Jesus to powerfully reveal to us his loving Father. Jesus had a perfect relationship with his Father.
The Son of God always felt recognised by his heavenly Father; when in obedience to the call of God Jesus submitted to baptism he heard the voice, ““You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.”” (Luke 3:22). Since my father’s father had died when he was four it’s not surprising that my own dad rarely gave me positive feedback or shared with me the reason for why he did things; but Jesus could say, “the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he is doing” (John 5:20). Jesus loved talking about his Father. He was always praying to his Father and so he taught us to pray from the heart, “Our Father who is in heaven” (Matt 6:9; John 11:41-42). One of the signs of a church in spiritual confusion is when you hear people praying to “God” or “Dear God” instead of to the Father. I even sent an email to the Anglican archbishop of Perth about this recently. In Jesus’ life it seemed that the tougher things got the more aware he was that God was his loving heavenly Father.
Christ prophesied to his disciples, “you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.” (John 16:32). In the Garden of Gethsemane, knowing that the leaders of Israel had refused to recognise him as Messiah and that he would soon be crucified, Jesus prays most intensely; ““Abba, Father all things are possible for you, yet not what I will but what you will.”” (Mark 14:36). The word “Abba” was a word for “father” used in Jesus’ own Aramaic language; some people have mistakenly taught that “Abba” means “daddy”. But this word was used by both little children and adult children to address their father and I do not expect my five grown up children to call me “daddy”. Jesus’ prayer to God as “Abba” is a prayer of great strength and maturity. It needed to be strong, deep and intimate because of what he was about to go through on the cross.
The greatest thing about God becoming a flesh and blood person like us is that it means the Almighty can think like we think and feel all that we feel – this is most powerful in the cross (John 1:14; Heb 2:14-15). When Christ cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” it means he feels he is not recognised as a Son by his Father in heaven (Mark 15:34; John 1:11). On the cross Jesus was coming under the terrible curse of being treated as Fatherless, he felt like someone in whom God could not see his image; all this happened because Jesus was carrying the sin, shame and pain of the human race (Ps 22:1ff; Isa 42:19; Rom 8:3; 2 Cor 5:21; Gal 3:13).
The experience of not being recognised as a human being with dignity and worth is a terrible one. My parents never seemed to take my thoughts and opinions seriously. I can remember as a teenager being so frustrated and angry with their stubbornness and sheer refusal to treat me as an equal that I would repeatedly hit my head against the wall and punch myself in the head. Since this brought only greater rejection I became more and more depressed and hit the bottle as early in my life as I could. Without the grace of God I certainly could have become an alcoholic.
Praise God however the cross isn’t the end of Jesus’ story; Jesus was raised from the dead. The resurrection means that all the darkness of sin and death has been destroyed in God’s victory over Satan’s shame and blame (Heb 2:14-15; 1 John 3:8). When Jesus was raised from the dead he was recognised as Son by the Father on our behalf; in the apostle Paul’s powerful language, Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power by the Holy Spirit through his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:4 cf. Rom 6:4). Shame is a feeling that comes into our hearts when we feel our worth as human beings and children of God is not recognised. Jesus has covered all our shame. The more we have revelation from the Holy Spirit that the Father has recognised Jesus as his Son in our place the less shame there will be in our lives. To fully understand what it means to be children of God we need the help of spiritual fathers and mothers. This is where the Church in Australia; Indigenous, European or ethnic, has a big problem.
Spiritual Fathers
I remember speaking with an Indigenous pastor some time ago and he made an important and painful point. He said “People in white churches are happy for us to come along and play the guitar and sing, but they don’t want an aboriginal person to be their pastor.” It is an embarrassment to admit that I have never met an aboriginal Anglican minister in Perth. The recognition problem however also goes the other way. I have stated publicly that aboriginal Christians have a key role in any future spiritual revival in Australia (e.g. http://cross-connect.net.au/indigenous-glory/). I have however been in a number of Christian meetings across the country where the Indigenous leaders showed anger, if not hatred, at white people. One man actually said, “We’ve forgiven you but we’re still angry with you!” This is terribly confusing, what sort of a loving Christian father would ever say to his child; “I’ve forgiven you but I’m still angry with you!” That’s not real forgiveness. When God the Father forgave us at the cross his anger was taken away forever; and no anger means no shame!
What we all need, black, brown, white, yellow, is spiritual fathers/mothers who have a heart like that of the apostle Paul. Before he met Jesus Paul was a fanatical Jew who considered all non-Jews to be idol worshippers so unclean that you couldn’t even eat with them. But after Paul met Jesus he could say, “I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” (Eph 3:14-15). As a true spiritual father it didn’t matter to him what race you belonged to, you were a child of God to be equally loved and equally recognised (1 Cor 4:15; Gal 3:28). This is the great need of our nation today. We all need fathers in the faith, white people need Indigenous spiritual fathers/mothers and vice-versa. The Bible says “For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, 20 and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.” (Col 1:19-20). The church exists on earth to show people that reconciliation with God is real, but they will only believe us when the Indigenous children of God and the people of God from other races live and work together as one family under our one Father in heaven.
The God whom we worship is powerful enough to do this but only if all of us in the Body of Christ surrender our prejudices and fears to Jesus. Only then can there be lasting revival in this country with Indigenous believers taking the place of leadership God always intended. We need one another desperately in a country which is fast running away from every form of godliness.
Conclusion
Keith came and shared at a meeting in the city the other day, called Perth Prayer. In a very honest and moving way he told us about about how different things were done to him over the years which could leave someone feeling ashamed; “shame jobs” he called them. At the end he told us we are “praise children” and not “shame children”. Over the years people have said that aboriginal culture is a culture of “toxic shame” while European culture is a culture of guilt. In my lifetime I think this has changed a lot; anyone who sticks a needle in their arm to inject “ice”, whether they are black or white, has a shame problem, anyone who bashes their girlfriend or wife has a shame problem, anyone who lives with a woman outside of marriage or gets her pregnant has a shame problem, anyone who is in a hurry to get mum or dad into a nursing home has a shame problem. Respect for authority has collapsed across mainstream Australian culture and this is not a so-called “aboriginal problem”. As a nation we are in a dreadful state and only a mighty movement of God can help us.
The first step in every revival is humility; white is not better than black and black is not better than white; Jesus is greater than all. Neither Indigenous nor western culture can save us, we need a revival of God’s kingdom culture today raising up spiritual fathers/mothers to care for all the children of God. This is exactly what we must pray for TOGETHER.